Koe Wetzel took a spin through the final mix of “Jaded” and smiles. “Yeah, for sure,” he says to his producer. The East Texas troubadour has been teasing the song almost from the moment he released The Night Champion in June, and for good reason: His
favorite duet partner is back.
Ella Langley, whose twangy “Choosin’ Texas” has been making history on the charts all summer long, collaborated with Wetzel on “Jaded,” a funky disco two-step tale of two lovers both wanting to know how the other became so jaded. The single drops on Friday via Columbia records. “Jaded” marks their second collab together, following “That’s Why We Fight,” off Langley’s 2023 debut EP, Excuse the Mess.
In late May, Wetzel and that producer, Gabe Simon, invited me to listen to not only the 11 tracks on The Night Champion — Wetzel’s sixth studio album — but to the seven additional songs that make up the album’s deluxe version, including “Jaded.”
Simon may be best known for his work with Lana Del Rey and Noah Kahan — he was nominated for a Grammy with the latter — but he and Wetzel have a bond that’s almost familial. When I walk through the gold-rimmed door of Nashville’s Gold Pacific Studios, I find the two men sitting at a console. This is their last chance to pick apart The Night Champion together, and they’ve both been fretting it. The album is Wetzel’s first as a new dad, and he’s been taking better care of himself than he has for most of his 10-plus year career. If the uncharted territory in Wetzel’s home life mellows out his music, he and Simon both want The Night Champion to bring out Wetzel’s outsized personality and melodies one more time.
“I’m the kind of guy that’s always gonna be brutally honest when it comes to lyrics. I don’t think it’s gonna be a drastic change,” Wetzel tells Rolling Stone. “But I just feel like this record really embodied the wild, crazy, says-whatever type of guy I’ve been.”
Simon cues up the record’s opening track, “Sinner.” By the time we finish, it becomes clear that The Night Champion has the most emotional range of any Wetzel record. The LP has been out long enough for listeners to hear this in tender songs like the Medium Build co-write “The Man” or “When I Was,” which showcases harmonies from Maggie Antone.
But “Sinner” gives little of this away. It’s a room-filling song, heavy on reverb from a banjo, which Simon ran through a half-stack of Marshall amplifiers. When he hits the chorus of, “I told God I’d be a better man/and with a tear in his eye he said, ‘Son don’t lie you’re probably going to do it again,’” Wetzel is joined in harmony by Sam Harris of X Ambassadors. Their voices echo over heavy kick drums and a bass guitar.
“I love the baritone,” Simon shouts over the song. “It’s like the big balls of the ‘Wetzel Sound.’”
Just about everyone in country music heard “High Road,” Wetzel’s 2024 duet with Jessie Murph that ended 2025 as the top song on Billboard’s Country Airplay charts and embodies the “Wetzel Sound”: the singer’s low vocals set over bass and percussion to make it seem as if the instruments are harmonizing with him, while allowing Murph’s voice to stand on its own.
“Usually, if we’re doing a big song like this, it’s gotta have [guitarist] Josh Serrato’s really heavy tones,” Simon says when “Sinner” finishes. “He brings the metal side of his sound. And then, we’re trying to find the perfect balance between you being able to understand what he’s saying, and him being fucked up. There is a sweet spot, though, and it’s different on a song like ‘I’ll Lock Up,’ where we want him to be really intelligible. But here, we’re trying to find that thing where, you don’t really care what he’s saying, because you’re just screaming at the top of your lungs.”
That notion is easiest to grasp in big, in-your-face songs like “Sinner” or “Circus,” but it’s also what Simon and Wetzel say make the ballads unique. Simon points to “When I Was” as an example. In the opening verse, Wetzel laments, “I’ll never be just as free as I was/when I was her man,” over an acoustic guitar. Then, the drums and bass line kick in, as do Antone’s haunting harmonies. The combination takes what otherwise could be a cry-in-your-beer song and adds the swagger that sets Wetzel apart. It’s the same principle as the in-your-face tones of the screamer numbers.
“We talk a lot here about Koe-difying stuff,” Simon continues. “That is, we take Koe, and if a song is sweeter, then we need to find a little bit of darkness. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, just a little bit of fucked up.”
Wetzel won’t argue with “a little bit of fucked up” as a descriptor. His reputation was almost certainly cemented when he released Noise Complaint in 2016, and the tale of a drunken-driving arrest in “February 28, 2016” that featured on the album. It helped that it was a true story, and when it launched Wetzel out of Texas bars and into the larger consciences of both country and rock, he had no problem leaning into it.
When it came to write and record The Night Champion, the follow-up to his mainstream breakout 9 Lives, Wetzel hadn’t outgrown his raging party days, but he recognized that he was older, had responsibilities, and a business to uphold. He’s engaged now too, and he and his fiancée recently welcomed their first child, a daughter. He wanted a record that reflected all that. “There was a lot of reckoning going on,” Simon recalls of making the LP.
“There was a lot of push-and-pull,” adds Wetzel. “Is this the last time I can be as vulnerable, and as honest, and say what I want to say? I don’t know how having a kid is gonna affect my songwriting. When I talk about The Night Champion — what I’ve been doing the last 10 years, and the sound up to now — it’s almost like closing a book. Not a chapter. A fucking book. I don’t know what’s coming.
“It’s more or less, like, I have to think about the situation more than just jumping into the water,” he continues. “Let’s dip our toe in and see what the temperature is before we cannonball. This is definitely the curtain call for how things have been up to this point.”
The thing about curtain calls, though, is that they bring out the biggest cheers from a crowd, and in turn, the best from an artist. Wetzel — and Simon — took aim at that feeling in making The Night Champion and its deluxe cohort. A song like “Ronnie Ray,” coming from Wetzel, would have been all but inconceivable even a year ago. It’s a fantasy inspired by the movie “Out Cold” and the Eve 6 song “Anytime” that accompanied the snowboard comedy. “I fucked with Eve 6 so heavily in middle school, and I told the guys I wanted to write a rock song,” Wetzel says.
So, he and Simon — along with Serrato and songwriters Carrie K and Aaron Ratiere — went to a cemetery not far from the studio. They were in search of names on headstones to take back the studio and make up a story. They chose “Ronnie Ray.”
“We need something to really spice up the vibe, we make up these characters, and Ronnie Ray was one of them. He’s a real piece of shit,” Simon recalls of the title character who spends the song on the business end of lyrics like “Ronnie Ray, you should have stayed away from my whole life.”
“Ronnie Ray” was part of a five-song drop of tunes from the deluxe release of The Night Champion in mid-July. Another of those was “Rolling & Smoking,” based on a relative of Carrie K, who also helped write the song. Even hearing that directly from Wetzel, it’s hard to imagine a song to better encapsulate Wetzel’s first decade in the spotlight, or Simon’s idea of the “Wetzel Sound.”
It starts slow, with Wetzel regretting his life choices and the possibility he’ll wake up on a park bench one day with a bottle of tequila. This may be that dark, slightly-fucked-up edge in his ballads, but it gives way to a full-blown, shout-at-the-top-of-your-lungs chorus: “I was smoking, drinking, fighting and fucking/here’s to hoping I can turn this shit around.”
It’s a chorus that fans on Wetzel’s ongoing Night Champion World Tour are all but certain to lose their voice screaming back at the star.
“That shit is gonna go off online like crazy,” Wetzel smiles. “I’m calling that from the jump.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose upcoming book, Sonoran Sounds, is set for release in March 2027 via Back Lounge Publishing.
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